Background

Looking back, how do you think your
parents shaped your thinking about the world?

Not very much. My father never went to high school, and my mother never got
out of high school. So they were not people of great political interest or
insight.

Did you have any teachers when you
were growing up who shaped your interest in politics or your writing skills?

I had an excellent English teacher in the tenth grade who taught me everything
there is to know about grammar and word usage, and that was very valuable. It
was not a lot of fun at the time, but it was a very valuable semester, and I
treasure it.

I went to Ann Arbor High School, which was, then, such a good high school
that if one was on the college preparatory program and got a C+ average, one then was automatically admitted to the
University of Michigan.

What world events occurred during
your growing up years? And did any of them particularly impact you?

The prolonged and deep Depression influenced everybody. What was going on
in Europe kind of passed us over; that is, was not much talked about by history
or social science teachers in high school. There was only one who really made
much of it, which was rather surprising. And I was not especially interested
... I was more interested in math and physics, and drama.

Drama.

And rhetoric, and that sort of thing, than I was in politics or world events.

Where did you do your undergraduate
work?

I started at Oberlin, and I graduated from Oberlin.

What was your major?

I started as a math major, almost completed it, and then shifted to economics.

What about economics attracted you?

Well, I thought I knew two things. One is, I didn't want to have a career
in which I taught. I didn't want to have a career in which I was expected
to write. So I thought economics would give me a variety of choices from government
to business.

Then I went to graduate school at Columbia, in economics. I could see that
I was not going to be a real economist. If you're not attracted to a field
enough to read beyond the requirements, just to read more because you're curious
and you want to know more than is required at any given course -- if that's
not the case, then you're in the wrong field. So I finally began to ask myself,
what did I really enjoy most in college? And the answer was English literature
and political philosophy. So I took a lot of English literature courses and
loved it, but realized that I would never write a novel or a poem, and I would,
therefore, be a critic -- a very honorable profession, but it didn't inspire
me. So political philosophy won, and I'm very pleased it did.

Any teachers that you had at Columbia
or at Oberlin that pointed you in either of these two directions?

The teacher and the wife of the teacher who influenced me most was John Lewis
and his wife, Ewart Lewis.

And they were at?

They were at Oberlin

I took just two half-courses from John Lewis, one in theory and the other
in American government, but I lived with the Lewises for a semester. Ewart Lewis
was a highly knowledgeable person in the field of medieval thought, and published
a book, a one-volume version by Knopf and two volumes published in England,
called Medieval Political Ideas. We had very interesting kitchen conversations
about the interpretation of Saint Augustine, for example, and I enjoyed all
of that immensely. So when trying to make the final decision, my wife and I
went back to Oberlin and visited the Lewises and talked about it. That confirmed,
by then, a strong inclination, and I shifted from economics to political science.

Has your work been influenced by
economic theory or is it merely that you were a student of economics in an
earlier phase of your life?

It was influenced very much by a microeconomic theory. It really is built
on a microeconomic theory, which I would say is the major influence. The second
influence is anthropology, which I never studied formally as a student. But
I read a great deal of anthropology, and the analogy is with segmentary lineage
systems, or in Durkheim's terms, mechanical societies rather than organic societies
or solidary societies. The analogy is quite close.

What about political scientists,
any teachers or intellectual influences that stand out, other than, obviously,
the classical literature, which we'll talk about in a minute?

I had very good professors in the field of international politics, but none
of them were people who were attuned to theory in the sense that I have been
talking about. Certainly, everybody dealt with those who were considered to
be the major theoretically oriented people in the field, as we know, from Thucydides
onward.